Overview on the Beliefs of Baby Boomers

The birthrate in the United States of America rose to almost 20% after the World War II (1946). It again increased to another 12% in 1947. Finally, it peaked up to 4.3 million babies in 1957. Therefore, from 1946 to 1964, there were 77 million babies born in America, they were called as "baby boomers". Today, boomers comprise 28% of the US populations since the birthrate returned to normal in 1965.

But the said numbers of babies are considered as a statistical anomaly in the birthrate of the United States according to some researchers. It is because some of the baby boomers have detached themselves in that generation and lives as if they were not born between the years 1946 to 1964.

Discriminations even happened considering baby boomers as different species. They were compared to the 1969 generation where they were marked as the holiest, most curious, and brightest of all generation in the human history.

As the years passed by, these opinions have greatly changed and the boomer's criticism reached a fevered pitch. The baby boomer's generation was dubbed as a self-absorbed generation. They defined themselves not through sacrifices as their parents had experienced but by indulgences. Other critics even wrote that throughout the American history, baby boomers were the most self-seeking, self-centered, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing, and self-interested generation.

These views about the boomers have an underlying gravity, unifying principle, and hermeneutic understanding of the world. The reasons behind are natural survival, class struggles, relativism, and lack of knowledge. Boomers became a part of the culture. But their concerns lie more on dominant concerns and dominant passions.

The Boomer's Six Commandments was even established based from these worldviews. But these do not apply to all baby boomers because there is always an exception. There is no monolithic generation. It was shaped by circumstances wherein these circumstances are not uniformed like generations. Nevertheless, every generation must live according to commandments or rules.

1.    Thou shall be hip. According to some studies, the baby boomer's major problem is the refusal of growing up. Their adolescence periods were prolonged, taken in various forms such as physical fitness obsession, youth worship, and embarrassment on the natural aging process.  Others include their aspiration to stay in style, hip, and current. Boomers do not consider it as a mere trendiness but a tendency to being externalized and magnified. That is why even during their aging years, they try to maintain the fashion of their era insisting that those times were frozen on them.

2.    Accept culture changes to stay relevant.  The boomers foresee themselves as a force that can transform cultures. However, they did not succeed. Instead of becoming culture transformers, the culture itself transformed them. The boomers accepted the culture's promise of eternal relevance for their rendered services. The only problem was that this relevance can deliver them only popularity.

3.    Honor thy individuality. America is the civilization known for radical individualism. The novel expression that is acquainted only with egotism sapping public life virtues and later on destroy and attack others. Boomers lived during the peak of the women's rights, civil rights, anti-war movements, and reproductive rights.

4.    Thou shall forget history. Boomers always declare themselves as the first generation to experience new milestones in their lives which include childbirth, adolescents, parenthood, marriage, and middle age. They know history, however they just question its importance to them.

5.    Thou shall feel guilty if you sell out. Boomers manifest their guilt interestingly. They maintain the defiance attitude along with their youth convictions as they abandoned convictions themselves. At heart, boomers remain as revolutionaries while they live the protestant, middle class, white-bread American dream.

6.    Thou shall question authority. There was a serious problem that rises on the part of most boomers. Their motto was to trust no one over thirty. Their rebellion towards authority is a skeptical approach to the pastoral authority, polity, and doctrinal standards of the church. Boomers have rejected this authority in two ways. They either denied the Bible's authority right away or relativize the Bible's authority like a Protestant Evangelicalism.

Although these boomers' rules create issues and controversy, it influenced and altered the way on how American thinks. And even it was predicted that all boomers will be gone, still many baby boomer's followers are still there.

Daniel Silver